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Sunday, April 16, 2006

How to crash/ hang Yahoo! Messenger: IM Flood

This trick does work, cause it was ‘discovered’ accidentally by me and hence has been tested on a lot of friends (with disastrous results)!

I wouldn’t call this an exploit since it is very much present in Yahoo! messenger itself. I just found about it, tried it and then enjoyed a lot. You will also!

Here is the explanation:

TRICK- Make sure that the person whose messenger you are going to crash is on your buddy list. This trick may also work with those who are not, however I have not tested with that.

What the trick is; it is pretty simple. When you do the thing described below, a lot of messenger windows will open on the victims computer and hence in the process either crash their messenger and make them go offline OR hang their computer forcing them to restart.

It is actually an IM flood. Read below to understand more.

HOW TO EXECUTE - Start a chat session, say with your best buddy. Now while you are at it: press in sequence and hold down the keys after that:

CTRL + SHIFT + R

First press CTRL, then SHIFT and then finally R. The more longer you hold them, the more disastrous the results; since more IM windows will open.

This trick has never failed but I can’t gaurantee about it working with versions 6.x or below. It works and that too for sure with version 7 (the latest one, with voice)

Two things can happen. They have equal probability. Either the computer will hang (and once it does, there is no way out except restart) OR Yahoo! Messenger will crash, forcing the victim to go offline. If you really want to kill that guy, keep on holding for the next 20 minutes and he won’t be able to come online. For sure.

EXCEPTION - Suppose you go on an ‘IM flooding’ spree after reading this. And then one of your friends (your victim!) learns about it too. He decides to take revenge. What to do now? Well, in that case stop using Yahoo! Messenger and switch to other multi - client IM tools such as Gaim, Miranda. Or you can use Meebo {www.meebo.com} When they try this trick on you and you are either on a multi client IM or Meebo, it won’t work. So, retaliate!

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS - When you press the combination above, you are requesting contact details from the person with whom you are chatting. But here is the catch: instead of doing it in one window only, whenever you ask for contact details, everytime a new window opens. This is the exploit. And hence, this trick will always work, cause the feature to request contact details is built in Yahoo! Messenger itself.

COMMENTS - This trick is the ultimate and the most simplest and works everytime. Just don’t start doing it with everyone. I can tell you from my own experience, it is very frustrating and even one or two of my friends stopped talking with me cause when I did the IM flood, they lost important data that they had not saved. So be careful.

If it doesn’t work (means you are not doing it right) post it in comments and I will take the problems individually.